Back in 1983, at the time of the first Right to Life Referendum campaign, one of the left groupings came out with a pamphlet by someone who is now a middle-ranking academic in an Irish university. In the pamphlet she wrote of a woman’s right to an abortion up to (and I am relying on memory here, because it would take too much time rooting through files to find the original) ‘the last hour of the last day of the last month’ of the pregnancy.

A rather extreme view, one might think, reading it at first glance. But then, on reflection, not at all so.

Liberalism and its militant feminist element raise the biggest hue and cry over the most controversial cases. This is understandable—but it is purely a propaganada device. For individual cases, whether they be controversial or uncontroversial, have no role to play in the abortion argument as it is put forward.

A woman’s right to abortion, a woman’s ‘right to choose,’ is precisely that—a right. Or so the liberals would have it. And being a right it requires no justification. If, for whatever reason, a woman wishes to have an abortion, under the liberal prescription she has no need to make a case for it. It is purely a matter of individual choice. As possessor of a right, she is entitled to indulge that right as she sees fit—irrespective of whether, in the case of abortion, it be in the first month or last month of the pregnancy, or for cosmetic reasons, or reasons of maybe a more serious nature.

Now a right, on the liberal agenda, consists in general of something you pull out of the air, not because it is true, but because you want it to be true. The thing then is to propagandize it and sloganize it until it becomes embedded in the popular consciousness simply as a result of repetition. The ‘woman’s right to choose’ is a case in point.

Usually there is little by way of argument involved in the process. But the ‘woman’s right to choose,’ simply because it runs counter to at least two thousand years of thinking differently—for instance, Elaine Pagels, the feminist biblical scholar, speaks of ‘the everyday crimes of pagan culture’ as categorised in the Didache, one of the earliest Christian texts, predating at least some of the Gospels: ‘“You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not have sexual intercourse with boys . . . you shall not practice magic; you shall not murder the child in the womb, nor kill newborns . . . you shall not turn away the destitute”’ (Beyond Belief, The Secret Gospel of Thomas: Elaine Pagels: Pan Macmillan, 2005)—it is for this very reason, the liberal case for abortion, faced with the longstanding Christian antipathy to the practice, was forced to produce at least some justification for its position.

This consists simply in the assertion, assisted by a trawl through history for anything that might back up the contention, that the child in the womb is not a human being until the moment it is born. This is another of those assertions that is true simply because the liberals and feminists want it to be true. It leads to a surreal Tommy Cooper type of situation. On the one hand, we have the infant in the womb, at the point of birth—but according to the feminists it is not really an infant, but rather a thing, a foetus, a—in the words of a feminist speaker at a meeting in Cassidy’s in Park Street back in the early 1980s—zygote; and thus amenable to being disposed of.

On the other hand, a few moments later the infant is born, and—‘just like that!’—it is suddenly a child, and subject to the full rights of a human being, including the right to life, not to mention the full panoply of feminist ooh-ings and aah-ings that often accompany such events.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is a sort of schizophrenia—to use the word in its everyday sense as a synonym for split-personality—at the root of the whole liberal and feminist position on abortion—a position that is hard to square with the often over-the-top concern with children’s rights and children’s interests that is another stated mainstay of the liberal agenda.

On a certain level, of course, both positions are held cynically, as political devices aimed at furthering the interests of the women’s movement—or whatever it is that underlies the women’s movement. But at another level, where the ‘argument’ shades off into the hysterical, one can sometimes sense the operation of something different—conscience, perhaps.

Faced with the dichotomy that lies at the heart of their position, many feminists go simply into denial mode. Animated by a repressed sense of guilt over abortion, their instinctive reaction is to exaggerate the maternal and caring sides of their natures by way of unconscious compensation. But that is another day’s argument . . .

One commentator, at least, has set herself the task of cutting through the whole web of prevarication that has clouded the issue. Writing in 2008, Camille Paglia, the prominent and controversial American feminist, goes on to say:

‘Let's take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice . . . [However] I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue.’

To put it another way: ‘Abortion is murder, Sisters. A necessary murder—but still murder.’ A chilling statement, no doubt—yet one that penetrates to the heart of the debate with all the sudden clarity of the sun through the portal of Newgrange on a cloudless 21st of December.

'I shot a man in Reno . . .'

I may indeed be getting the wrong end of the stick here, because all I’ve really heard or read are the headline reports on television and in the newspapers. But I am going to plough on regardless. What I am talking about is the recently proposed changes in the law in relation to killing.

Now the first proposed change, regarding the killing of intruders, seems to me to miss (and again I have to admit that I have not read the particular report but am flying by the seat of my pants) an important point. The fact of whether somebody confronts an intruder or doesn’t confront him has historically, I would suggest, been little influenced by the matter of law. There are those who will have a go, irrespective of what the law says, and worry about it afterwards. Then there are those who shrink from confrontation, not because of the law, but simply because it is in their nature to shrink from confrontation.

These things happen in the heat of the moment, and an appreciation of the finer points of the law is unlikely to count for much, other than as a post-facto excuse by those who have shrunk from confrontation.

But then there is another category: those hell bent on mayhem, who imagine it lovingly in detail, and create fictional scenarios where they can accomplish their desire, scenarios usually involving various degrees of provocation. Usually the imagining is sufficient, and the fantasy serves its own end of reducing mental tension. In such situations, fear of consequences, and the anticipatory imagining of such consequences, is usually enough to take the edge of such wimpish bloodlust.

It’s a bit like masturbation really . . .

But now it is proposed that the situation be changed. The wimp is to be given free rein. It’s rather like Hemingway’s Francis Macomber—the type of guy who goes on safari with a big game hunter in order to shoot animals from a safe distance and think himself macho.

One can imagine the scene . . . something, to use another fictional analogy, along the lines of Michael Douglas’s character in All Fall Down, sitting there night after night, shotgun on knee, window left provocatively open . . .

Make my day, Suckah . . . !

The second proposed change to the law—the one concerning the definition of provocation—seems to me (to the extent that I understand it) even more contentious. The idea of a delay—for such was the way it was described on television—between provocation and killing, involving the idea that something was playing on your mind, until one day ages later it suddenly triggers you to action, seems to me potentially very dangerous.

One aspect of the proposal, according to the newspaper reports, is to enshrine the concept of cumulative provocation in law—the idea that while no one incident of provocation taken on its own is sufficient to justify killing, the totality of such provocations may nonetheless be taken into account.

Under pressure of the feminists, we have had for several years now a de facto open season on husbands. Some possibly deserved it—but there were other cases where one was left with the distinct sense of the whole thing being framed in such a way as to take advantage of the changed atmosphere. Also, it was very much a one-way street—the idea of cumulative provocation didn’t at all seem to apply to men.

The problem with this whole idea of cumulative provocation, no matter how evenhandedly it is applied, is that, in the end, it seems likely to encourage the Frank Carson “It’s the way you tell ‘em!” type of approach. The idea of evidence and probability takes second place to the creation of a good narrative.

Simone Weil (and I seem to be writing of her a lot lately) was critical, not of the operation of the law, but of its cold majesty, and the contempt it showed towards the offender. But nowadays one gets the sense that things have swung diametrically in the opposite direction. It may be a consequence of the general decay of leadership and authority, but one gets the impression that judges are less and less the remote and frightening figures of tradition, and more akin to football referees, grinning as they hand out yellow cards by way of deflecting aggression.

Law has to change to some degree with the times, but perhaps the process has become too pro-active (whatever that actually means). One gets the impression of law lecturers and commentators etc.—often, one suspects, with an ideological bias—acting more like X Factor contestants and chasing popularity than genuinely considering the implications of what they are doing.

But then perhaps they are afraid . . . perhaps they’re all afraid of what they can see subliminally coming down the line . . . all reactively as lemmings guessing as to which will be the winning side.

There are other issues involved in the new proposals that seem to carry even more serious implications than those discussed . . . but I would need to read the actual report itself before venturing into that argument. And time is a factor.

If I get the opportunity, I will come back to the matter . . .

'If the left one don't get you, then . . .'

I was going through some old papers recently, and I found two pages from the Daily Mail of March 13, 2008, featuring an article headed, Sexual Predator or a Victim? It was to do with the matter of Cathal O’Searcaigh, which was causing much hand-wringing in cultural circles at the time. Had he been an ordinary poor hoor of no particular talent then the verdict would have been immediate and damning. As it was, because of his fashionable homosexuality, and the fact that he was also a poet, the matter caused a certain indecision amongst those members of the chattering classes who in other circumstances would have been only too willing to jerk the knee.

The article consisted of opinion pieces by different media personalities. One segment was by Philip Nolan, described as an author and journalist, who went on to say of O’Searcaigh: ‘He is not a paedophile, because each of the boys was over sixteen, the age of sexual consent in Nepal.’

This immediately provokes the surreal, but not at all absurd, picture of someone forearmed with a schedule of international sexual legislation and a flexible travel plan being able to pick his or her steps from country to country without ever falling foul of the law. While at the same time, your common or garden blunderer, pursuing exactly the same course, but in a less organized way, could well find himself locked up in some local clink and internationally demonized as a paedophile.

The meaning of terms such as paedophile cannot depend on the vagaries of legislation if such terms are to have any rational use. To raise things truly to the level of the absurd . . . if the government was to decide overnight to raise the age of consent to, say, twenty-five—something in itself not necessarily that absurd, in that, for example, Adler put the upper limit of adolescence somewhere around the age of twenty; Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff at twenty-five—then they could put the whole country in jail.

But, of course, this is to miss the point. The word ‘paedophile’ is one of those words whose use would only be hampered by too close a definition. It is no longer primarily a rational term, but rather a means of abuse. In its current usage it is akin to the daub of paint on the door of those to be killed during a pogrom or a yellow star on the coat of a Jew during the war.

A sure sign that a word has left the confines of the dictionary and become lodged in the viscera—especially if it is a complicated word—is the extent that it becomes second nature in the mouths of those who in other circumstances would find it hard to spell ‘bus’.

Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. Every age and every political system has had a need for meaningfully sounding but conveniently vague catchphrases as a way of dealing with its perceived enemies and distracting the populace. It’s just the way things are . . .

But at least we have the assurance that Cathal O’Searcaigh is not a paedophile.

But just when you might think he was out of the frying pan, along comes Terry Prone, in the same article, to put him instead into the fire: ‘The problem is that a sexual relationship with a much younger person does not have to be physically coercive in order to be abusive. Having sex with these young men when he is so important to their continued health, livelihood and even existence is wrong—because it cannot be between equals. Coercion takes many forms, not all of them violent.’

Now it is clear here that, at least implicitly, Prone accepts that O’Searcaigh’s behaviour was not paedophilic. But she still wants to have another bite at the cherry and express her disapproval in a different way. And quite possibly she is right. But the thing that fascinated me at the time was the way in which this argument was likely to be used as a stalking horse for the entry of the ‘equality agenda’ into the whole matter of sexual relations.

Prone, of course, put it in best case format, speaking of ‘sexual relationship with a much younger person’. Now the first point to make is that this would obviously be a person above the age of consent. The second is the old saying that ‘hard cases make bad law’.

Now, of course, law is not involved here—at least for the moment. It is more in the matter of a moral stance—implicitly a moral stance with teeth. But where public pronouncements of morality go, especially in relation to controversial matters, the law is often not far behind.

And even in relation to arriving at moral judgements, it is worth reading between the lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing though he was in relation to law: "Great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment."

The other point is the sheer relentlessness of the equality agenda, the weapon that is being used more than any other to unpick the current fabric of society. Give it a toehold in any situation and, like the beggar on horseback, it will ride to the devil.

Now Prone made her argument with some finesse, but that was not the case with some of the incidental commentators on the controversy, many of whom seemed hardwired to the pursuit of maximum equality.

It was with this in mind, rather than specifically Prone’s contribution, that I wrote the following letter to the Irish Times. Of course, it wasn’t published. Mercifully so, because it is a bad letter—crass and vulgar. But then it was meant to be so—for it was intended to be provocative.

It also implicitly involved a sideswipe at the hypocrisy of the politically correct—ever ready to condemn ‘sex predators’ (whatever they be?) and ‘inequality’ on the one hand, while queuing up at the Square to cheer Bill Clinton on the other.

Dear Editor.

Let me say at the outset that I have not seen the documentary nor followed the controversy or correspondence in the press. But that being said, you would want to be deaf, dumb and blind not to become at least peripherally aware of it.

The thing that interests me is not what Cathal O Searcaigh did or didn’t do - it is instead this presumption that has crept into the debate that sexual relations demand some basis of equality. In this case, economic equality.

It seems nowadays, at least in some circles, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a man of even comparatively modest means to enjoy life’s basic pleasures. The argument seems to be that if you are having a casual sexual relationship with a person who is better off than you are then automatically you are being exploited.

The issue of consent doesn’t enter into it. The theory seems to run along the lines that one person’s comparative wealth must inevitably – like some human form of ‘lamping’ - dazzle the other person into volitional paralysis.

But why stop at economic inequality? There is no end to the inequalities potentially available in human relationships. What, say, of differences of class or intelligence or education? Are those with only a second-level education - or no education at all - to be ring-fenced from the attentions of those with university degrees?

No doubt, at this point, some those most vehement in the debate are - like stock Victorian fathers - muttering about the matter of one’s ‘intentions’. But intentions are old hat, now. We live in the era of relationships and one night stands and, to paraphrase (in the interests of getting printed) Erika Jong, the ‘zipless sexual encounter.’ In that sense, it strikes me that the debate to date has engendered a great deal of hypocrisy.

Leaving the matter of Cathal O Searcaigh aside for the moment, the general point I am trying to make is that if people today want to be regarded as independent and liberated, then it must be taken as given that they are capable of being so, and of using their natural intelligence, despite the blandishments of wealth and power, not to go into places or relationships where they shouldn’t. And if people still get burned, as inevitably they will, then the best one can say, outside of a certain basic sympathy, is: Get on with it! . . .

Yours etc.

A localised front . . .

It might seem that I wrote somewhat dismissively of Simone Weil in my last posting. But it would be wrong to see it this way. I was writing about psychoanalysis, and the secular view that underlies psychoanalysis, i.e. that there is only the material world and everything is assuageable and explicable solely in terms of that world. It is a subject not particularly associated with Weil in her role as a mystic, whatever about as a philosopher. And, as such, I was only writing about her in passing . . .

In a certain sense, too, Weil’s attitude was closer to that of Idries Shah’s (also discussed in the last posting) than I have previously indicated—to the extent that she could equally write that ‘Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.’

The difference between the two of them was that to Shah this matter of a compulsive seeking of attention represented a psychological absurdity, whereas for Weil it was the cry of the bruised soul, something to be taken seriously, and dealt with compassionately, something that one opened oneself up to at the cost of real personal pain.

The deepest level of human suffering, Weil described as affliction [that she had a special definition of what constituted affliction need not concern us here]. What it involved was an agony that paradoxically also represented the possibility of being approached by God. Thus, what was torment on the physical and/or mental plane might equally be interpreted as a mercy on the spiritual one.

What differentiates the Christian (and not just the specifically Christian) from the secular point of view is that Christianity offers to the convinced believer the possibility of a meaning to suffering. And not just to the sufferer but also to those who minister to suffering. In taking aboard the suffering of the afflicted, they also in some sense share in the possibility of the approach by God.

By contrast, to the secularist suffering is simply an evil with absolutely no redeeming qualities attached. Nor is there any consoling message in suffering for those heroic secularists who devote their lives to treating it. Which may explain why, in America, anyway, physicians have almost three times the suicide rate of the general population; while in terms of the medical profession itself psychiatrists seem to hold top spot.

Nor does this simply apply to those dealing with human misery, it applies also to the sufferers themselves. A study in hospitalized patients suffering from depression, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry (2004), has been described as finding that ‘religious affiliation is associated with significantly lower levels of suicide compared to religiously unaffiliated people, atheists and agnostics.'

For the secularist, the only method of dealing with suffering is to abolish it—something ultimately futile, in that the afflicted, like the poor, are, and always will be, with us. Suffering is not susceptible to eradication—it simply changes its form.

In a passage that may at first glance seem contradictory to the general thrust of this posting, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her seminal book, On Death and Dying, said, in relation to those who died best: ‘Religious patients seemed to differ little from those without a religion. The difference may be hard to determine, since we have not clearly defined what we mean by a religious person. We can say here, however, that we found very few truly religious people with an intrinsic faith. Those few have been helped by their faith and are at best comparable with those few patients who were true atheists. The majority of patients were in between, with some form of religious belief but not enough to relieve them of conflict and fear.’

What Kübler-Ross is saying here is not that religion was of no benefit in terms of facing up to death, but rather that it had to be a religious belief of, arguably, an almost transcendent quality. When I wrote above that ‘Christianity offers to the convinced believer the possibility of a meaning to suffering . . .’, I should really have also italicized the word ‘convinced’.

Thus, on the one hand, you have the convinced atheists, and, on the other, those of a convinced religious persuasion, with bookended in between the great morass of everyone else.

Interestingly enough, certain parallels can be drawn here with the experiences of Bruno Bettleheim, the psychologist, in Dachau and Buchenwald, where he found that the people who were least likely to be broken by the camp system were the Jehovah’s Witnesses, followed by, in second place, the communists.

Notice that the two ‘best’, or at least the most committed, groupings in both Kübler-Ross and Bettelheim form a very real dichotomy—and one that is not predicated on class or politics or race or whatever. This fundamental opposition is between those who, for want of a better term, accept that there is a spiritual substrate to existence, and those who don’t.

It is this primal dichotomy, I would suggest, that underlies all the lesser dichotomies of class and politics etc., which are really only subsets of it. It is the manifestation in human affairs of the cosmic struggle between light and darkness—which struggle alone supplies the possibility of understanding the meaning and purpose of universal existence.

What I am saying is that the fundamental conflict in the human world is between, to simplify things, those who believe in God and those who believe only in nature. Those seriously involved on both sides—in terms of the examples given: the atheists-cum-communists and the religiously committed—confront each other in a conflict with cosmic implications.

And then there are the rest of us . . .

Writing of the middle ground or morass, and in terms of what was clearly a worst case situation, Bettelheim went on to discuss those members of the ‘apolitical German middle class,’ who for whatever reason also found themselves in the camps—and he is writing here of Dachau and Buchenwald in the years 1938/39, when the purpose of the concentration camps wasn’t as yet primarily exterminative:

‘Non-political middle class prisoners (a minority group in the camps) were those least able to withstand the initial shock. They were utterly unable to understand what had happened to them and why. More than ever they clung to what had given them self respect up to that moment . . . No consistent philosophy, either moral, political, or social, protected their integrity, or gave them the strength for an inner stand against Nazism. They had little or no resources to fall back on when subject to the shock of imprisonment. Their self-esteem had rested on a status and respect that came with their positions, depended on their jobs, on being head of a family, or similar external factors . . . Nearly all of them had lost their desirable middle class characteristics, such as their sense of propriety and self respect. They became shiftless, and developed to an exaggerated extent the undesirable characteristics of their group: pettiness, quarrelsomeness, self pity. Many became chisellers and stole from other prisoners . . . They seemed incapable of following a life pattern of their own any more, but copied those developed by other groups of prisoners. Some followed the behaviour pattern set by the criminals. Only very few adopted the ways of political prisoners, usually the most desirable of all patterns, questionable as it was. Others tried to do in prison what they preferred to do outside of it, namely to submit without question to the ruling group. A few tried to attach themselves to the upper class prisoners and emulate their behaviour. Many more tried to submit slavishly to the SS, some even turning spy in their service (which apart from these few, only some criminals did). This was no help to them either, because the Gestapo liked the betrayal but despised the traitor’ (The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age: Bruno Bettelheim, Macmillan Free Press, New York, 1960).

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life . . . do-do . . . do-do-do-do-do-do . . .

A few mailings ago I cited some passages from a psychoanalytical profile of modern liberalism. The fact that I did so does not necessarily mean that I am a believer in psychoanalysis—it is just that in making an argument one tends to pick up the evidence wherever one can; and in this case it more or less coincided with my own observations down the years.

But then this—this suggested lack of belief in psychoanalysis—should surprise nobody who read my posting of the twentieth of November—the one to do with the Eiger. The underlying substance of that posting was that I am a convinced Doubting Thomas insofar as any possibility of a complete human knowledge of existence or any facet of existence is concerned. Whether it be Freud or Einstein or Pavlov or whoever—and no matter how they may view it themselves—there is no complete and unchallengeable theory of anything existing in the world. And even if there was, we have no way of knowing it.

Now, in terms of what I spoke of in my original mailing as the possibility of lesser ‘local’ or ‘contingent’ truths, the question is to what extent does Freudian psychoanalysis fit even this particular bill?

The first thing that needs to be said is that the overall Freudian structure is one of the great intellectual achievements of mankind—but then so also is Don Quixote. A great intellectual achievement need not encompass truth (with a small t) in any literal sense of the term. With such in mind—to what extent is Freud’s theory to be regarded as true?

Any exhaustive answer on this would require almost a lifetime’s study. The collected works of Freud run to some twenty-four volumes, not including the thousands of subsequent articles and books written by supporters, critics and rivals. A lifetime would be too long to devote to the study of something that in the end can come down only to a choice between three possible single-word conclusions: yes (it is true); no (it’s not true); and maybe (it is true; and, again, maybe it’s not).

Now it is undeniable that Freud here and there seems to touch on things that resound in us with a sense of deeper meaning. But the question is to what extent these insights arise from his theory—or to what extent they are more representative of the phenomenon of the village clock that although stopped still manages to be right twice in the day. In line with the suggestion that if you give sufficient monkeys sufficient typewriters for a sufficient length of time, then inevitably one of them will produce the works of Shakespeare, it follows that anybody of ability who dedicates his or her life to investigating a certain field of knowledge—in Freud’s case the underlying structure and operation of the human mind and its expression in bodily actions—must, even if only at random, hit upon ideas that are true in their own right.

On a more practical level, there has been over the years increasing debate over the efficacy of psychoanalysis, even as practiced directly by Freud, in the treatment of neurosis. The fundamental idea would seem to be that psychoanalysis, for all the brilliance of Freud as a theorist and writer, is really a delusionary system, a self-delusionary system, that has more to do with the deeper needs of Freud’s ego than with scientific fact.

Idries Shah, a well-known writer on Sufism, speaking on the hunger for attention that can exist in some (indeed, many; if not most) individuals:

‘. . . [they] might even turn up at the house and ask for attention. It’s very easy to illustrate this attention desire if one does not feel flattered by the attentions of the other person. I’ve very often spoken to people who’ve come to the house, for half an hour or forty-five minutes, absolute nonsense, just to make them happy, just to show them (although they don’t always see it) that what they wanted was attention; they did not really want metaphysical truths or interpretations or advice. And, as a matter of fact, there are so many jokes about that in the Middle East that one is almost surprised that it is so unknown here, relatively unknown’ (The Diffusion of Sufi Ideas in the West: Idries Shah, Keystone Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1972).

The relevance of this to psychoanalytical practice is too obvious to need underlining.

Simone Weil, writing from a diametrically different direction, yet about the same phenomenon of attention, says:

‘The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection,or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.
‘This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.
‘Only he who is capable of attention can do this’ (Waiting on God: Simone Weil, Fontana, 1959).

As I say, the two approaches are diametrically opposed. Shah’s might be described as the more cynical, Weil’s, perhaps, as the more naïve (although this is a characterization demanding of a much closer discussion).

But the fact is that although both identify in their different ways the importance of attention, it seems to me, nonetheless, that they both miss the point—Weil somewhat more so than Shah.

There is a widespread hunger abroad for attention in these modern times. Some of the people who came to Shah might have gone away momentarily satisfied with the attention they received—but it was liable to be a very short-lived satisfaction. For the fact is that in many, if not in most cases, it is a hunger that is unassuageable.

The fact is that so many people are black holes for attention—they can never get enough. The roots of this deficiency, I think, lie in childhood and some deprivation of necessary attention or love or whatever. It is a deficit that, not being satisfied at the appropriate time, can never be satisfied, no matter how strenuously the victim may in later years try to compensate for it. One can shovel attention and consideration on such a person all the waking day long, only for them to rise next morning, and every subsequent morning—like some brain-damaged patient, the blackboard of whose short-term memory has overnight been erased—just as hungrily empty and imploring as the day before.

And there is no direct cure for it. No way of restoring what has been lost or never found. At best, one may come to a realization of the futility of one’s actions, and an acceptance of the long-term and irremediable nature of the loss which underlay them. It amounts to the establishment of a sort of laid-waste ground zero, the destruction of all you believed in and clung to up until now, with no promise of anything beyond it other than a blank a hospital corridor leading straight to death.

The difference for the secularist, Freud, was that the establishment of self-knowledge didn’t just threaten with the possibility of the bleakness of existence, it guaranteed it. At most, Freud promised to ‘change [unconscious] neurotic suffering into everyday misery’; the root of neurosis being something he [Freud] could not cure, it was up to the patient to consciously endure it.

Freud’s statement is both a chilling and a magnificent statement of the existential secularist position—especially when counterposed to the laughable naivety of the recent spate of slogans financed by atheists on London buses: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life.’

Strip off the slab, sharpen up the obsidian knife . . .

A passage from J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough:

‘It was the belief of the ancient Irish that when their kings observed the customs of their ancestors, the seasons were mild, the crops plentiful, the cattle fruitful, the waters abounded with fish, and the fruit trees had to be propped up on account of the weight of their produce. A canon attributed to St. Patrick enumerates among the blessings that attend the reign of a just king “fine weather, calm seas, crops abundant, and trees laden with fruit.” On the other hand, dearth, dryness of cows, blight on fruit, and scarcity of corn were regarded as infallible proofs that the reigning king was bad.’

Not to mention economic collapse, swine flu, floods, and being turfed out of the World Cup. Indeed, all this nonsense about securing a replay is just that, nonsense. The mojo is simply not with us: we could have ten replays and the result would still be the same.

In ancient times, in situations like this, an unlucky king might well be running a nervous finger around the inside of his collar . . .

[For those of a literalist disposition, I'm being ironic . . .]

I'm still here . . .

When I began this process of blogging, I indicated that if I found that it was ego that was at the root of it, then I would abort the whole thing. But even in writing that I was being dishonest, and knew I was being dishonest—because the very fact of writing at all (or of doing anything) is ultimately informed by ego.

Blogging consists in giving one’s opinion on things. An opinion is at best a partial truth—when it is a truth at all. And a partial truth bears the same relationship to ultimate truth as a photograph of the north face of the Eiger does to the reality of the mountain it claims to portray.

And this is unavoidable. Ultimate truth is forever beyond us. We have no capacity for apprehending it. At best we can now and again take hold of the shreds of its coat-tails and then only for the briefest of seconds. It is possible to sometimes catch and relay a fragment of truth or reality—in this posting, I am using ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ as synonyms of each other—as reflected momentarily in some limited situation. But it is not Truth—it is only a local truth, a contingent truth, as short-lived in its beauty and duration as the rise and fall of a starburst rocket at Halloween.

The relatively few people who foresaw and warned against the economic disaster now swamping us comprehended, in their various ways, just such a corner of truth. But the world moves on—and the fact that they were right last time does not mean that they will be right next time or, for that matter, ever again . . . notwithstanding the strange human tendency of slavishly latching on to so-called ‘winners’ as though there was no possibility of their ever again being wrong.

Now if people who were right last time have no guarantee of being right next time, then the argument is logically capable of being turned on its head in favour of people who were previously wrong. Next time, who knows, they might be right. But in saying this we can see the native sense that underlies the popular faith in ‘winners’. It is a matter of pragmatism: the fact that someone has been successful in calling the toss in the past, while not guaranteeing that he will be equally successful in the future, at least proves that he is capable of being successful. Whereas with failure, no such signpost to success exists . . .

But this is all by way of digression . . .

But to get back to where I was originally heading . . . If we take the example of the Eiger, it is possible to postulate a process by which the ultimate truth about the mountain might be achieved. One could set up an archive involving all the scientific knowledge available about the mountain—its geographic details, mineral composition, dimensions etc.—together with an exhaustive set of photographs taken of it from every possible direction and in every possible weather condition. Add to this everything that has been written about it—together with a comprehensive hands-on experience of the mountain on the part of the student—and arguably you have the possibility of approaching the Eiger in its overall truth, its overall reality.

Except, of course, that you don’t . . . have such a possibility, that is.

Immersion in such a process of learning—a lifetime’s immersion—would no doubt produce an almost exhaustive knowledge of the Eiger. But it would still not represent, or even begin to represent, the ultimate reality of it. The sense of it gained would be akin to one of those old slot-machines that were still around when I was young—you can find the same mechanism, too, sometimes built into books—where a moving image was broken down into a sequence of still photographs and a mock animation produced by flicking through them at speed.

The thing is that the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality of anything, is not a cumulative or sequential or composite process. It is awareness—in a single intuition—of everything to do with the matter or thing in hand; everything known and ‘unknown’, lost or found, that has happened or has yet to happen. It is the phenomenon viewed within the setting of eternity . . .

And as such it is forever beyond us as human beings.

[For anyone that may be interested—that is, if there is anyone interested—the hiatus of almost a fortnight since my previous posting has been due to my being busy with other things. A situation likely to continue at least until Christmas—so that for the time being postings are likely to remain somewhat more sporadic than heretofore.]

Kidding Oneself (2) . . .

The question might be asked of me, arising from my most recent posting: Do I think that it is possible to engage in social and political activism without it in some way being ultimately a vehicle for the fulfillment of some unconscious emotional need?

And the answer I would have to give is no—I don’t think it is possible.

In relation to anything we do, the roots of our actions plunge much deeper than we can ever consciously know. It is open perhaps only to saints, or people analogous to saints, to approach any closer to an absolute knowledge of themselves and a rational control of their thoughts and actions—and then only to the extent that they have, as they say, already died to themselves. For the rest of us, no such disengagement from the influence of the emotions is possible.

When we speak of this or that individual as being more or less rational, it would be more accurate, I think, to talk in terms of he or she being more or less irrational. As a species, I believe, we are less rational than potentially rational—and I am using the term rational, not just in the conventional sense of the processes of abstract reasoning, but as a synonym for something more along the lines of, perhaps, say, enlightenment.

In such a circumstance, the systems of mechanical reasoning would continue to operate as before, but in the context of individuals of a deeper self-knowledge, compassion and unselfishness—and a deeper awareness, too, of the myriad of ways in which it is possible to deceive oneself—than the rest of us in general possess.

Is such a development possible on any sort of wide scale? Certainly not on the basis of the human species as it exists. Any such general change would involve at least several evolutionary shifts—and the nature of evolutionary shifts is that they involve minorities. The bulk of populations get left behind.

What is possible is for individuals to make the journey within the context of human existence as we know it . . . And it must be such a lonely journey—one that involves turning one’s back on the things that give human life its—ultimately delusionary—glamour and savour and sense of warmth. People who successfully take that path become, arguably, the leaven and justification for the rest of us—the true meaning of the ten just men of Sodom may lie somewhere along these lines.

Such people are not heroes likely to gain popular acclaim; instead they make the secret sacrifices by means of which the rest of us may live.

[I would hasten to point out, in case anyone should think so, that I am certainly making no personal claims in this regard. To quote Bertrand Russell (again!): ‘I made up my mind when I was young that I would not be restrained from preaching a doctrine merely because I have not practised it’—or, as I might add, am congenitally incapable of practising it.]

Kidding Oneself . . .

I touched in passing in my last posting on what is nowadays the cliché of the middle-class revolutionary—though of course it wasn’t always a cliché. For example, of the twelve members of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, as listed by E. H. Carr (The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. 1, Pelican 1966), the majority were from a middle-class or prosperous farming (or, in one case, even, an aristocratic) background. A somewhat greater majority might be categorized as intellectuals, in that at some stage or other they had attended university.

Nor were the Bolsheviks the sole organisation that might be categorized in this way. Nineteenth-century Russia was possessed of any number of middle-class individuals and movements with an interest in reforming or revolutionising society. The Bolsheviks just happened to be the ones who reached up from the scrum to grab the brass ring.

The most interesting of such movements was the Narodniks, who saw the peasantry as potentially the main progressive force in Russian society, and who instituted a movement back to the land on the part of thousands of idealists, all with the ostensible aim of radicalizing the peasantry.

I say ostensible aim, for beneath it there seems to have lurked an almost mystical fascination with the peasantry and with peasant life. Disguised as a revolutionary movement, what often seems to have been afoot was a middle-class search for authenticity—for the holy grail of something uncontaminated, organic and true surviving from an earlier and holier age.

Now in the Himalayas, where there is no naturally occurring salt, it is said that cattle will follow people in order to lick their sweat. Now, being cattle, there is obviously no great logical process going on here—beyond some instinctive recognition of the need for salt and some sensed recognition that salt can be got from sweat.

I would suggest something of the same scenario in relation to the Narodniks . . . there was of course a process of reasoning involved in their situation; but a process of reasoning that was, in fact, and often unknownt to itself, knitting, at least partially, a rational garment to disguise an unconscious yearning of the human soul—or at least the spiritually disenfranchised soul of the middle-class intellectual.

James Burnham, in his book, Suicide of the West (John Day, 1964), gives a more conventional argument for the liberal social and political engagement of our time:

“The guilt of the liberal [over being indulged and pampered as children] causes him to feel obligated to try and do something about any and every social problem, to cure every social evil . . . even if he has no knowledge of the suitable medicine, or for that matter, of the nature of the disease; he must do something about the social problems even when there is no objective reason to believe that what he does can solve the problem – when, in fact, it may well aggravate the problem instead of solving it.”

As far as it goes, I think that Burnham’s analysis is correct enough. The problem is that it does not go far enough. I suspect that underlying many of the orientations of the modern middle-class liberal—indeed, underlying many of the orientations of modern life in general—there is hidden the same search for personal authenticity as lay at the root of narodism.

How to explain what it means to suffer from a lack of authenticity? . . .

Firstly, it is a lack, every bit as much a lack as that which drives the cattle of the Himalayas to harass travellers. And just as unconscious in its operation, too—or, in human terms, perhaps semi-conscious.

In a way, it is the opposite of experiencing a phantom limb—that sense or pattern of wholeness that persists despite the fact of an amputation. In the case of the lack of authenticity, it is the nagging sense of something missing that one cannot quite put one’s finger on. It might be described as the psychic equivalent of body dysphoria (a relation of body dysmorphia).

It is a fretful sense of incompleteness, of in some way your life falling short of the hidden pattern of what it is to be human or happy or fulfilled, or even real—and all despite the fact that, as in some obsessive dream, you can count over and over through the elements that go to make up your ordinary human existence and seem to find nothing missing.

As I say, this lack of authenticity, this search for authenticity, seems an almost generalized condition of the modern developed world. But it is in terms of what we might call the disaffected middle-class—or the disaffected children of the middle class—that it is most clearly to be seen, and in a way that is most subversive of the theories of secular liberalism. Here we have people who are unhappy, yet on the secularist agenda have no right to be unhappy, enjoying as they do, and as they have done for most of the past fifty years, prosperity and stability and opportunity and the freedom to pursue pleasure.

In a paradoxical way, it might seem that, like the proverbial Chinese meal, the greater one’s access to material goods the greater the underlying emptiness that is ultimately revealed. Betrayed by their faith, or the faith of their parents, in material prosperity, disaffected youth turn instead to political and social activism, or the quietism of a drug-fuelled hedonism. And contrary to what it might seem, the one is not necessarily superior to the other. Both are ways of achieving roughly the same end.

The turn to political and social activism by the disaffected young over the past fifty or so years, is, I would suggest, in general less a matter of altruism or social guilt than a more roundabout way of seeking self-validation. What the druggie seeks to achieve through the pipe or the needle, the activist seeks to achieve through social and political engagement—a sense of oneness with the universe, an end to the dissonance he or she feels in relation to life as it is currently lived.

The politically and socially active (in the liberal and left-wing sense of the terms) deceive themselves when they think that they are doing things for the poor or the oppressed or the working class. Rather their activism is often a device for coming into contact with the poor etc., in their search, like the narodniks with the peasantry, for some bedrock of authenticity, some point of balance, some place of absolute truth, where they can firmly place their feet amid the crazy and undependable relativism of the rest of the world.

As I say, the whole process is analogous to that of cattle in the Himalayas—except with the cattle there is no mistake: they sense what they need and sense how to get it. It is with people that the process becomes complicated and the possibility—the guarantee—of self-deception comes into play.

Stealth Bombers . . .

I append an extract from a draft of an unfinished document begun in January of this year. Even in its uncompleted state, it still has, I think, something of relevance to say:

‘From the London Times of 22/1/2009: "The LSE economist Robert Wade addressed about 1,000 Icelanders recently at a protest meeting in a Reykjavik cinema, warning that large-scale civil unrest was on the way. The tipping point, he said, would be this spring."

Nothing very surprising in that, given the likely nature of the audience and implicitly the speaker. But it is significant. It strikes me almost as wishful thinking – the article that the quote is taken from comments, rather wistfully it seems, that ‘some say it could become another 1968 – a new age of rebellion.’

There are factors sufficient in the current economic situation to produce chaos and social breakdown of their own accord should they be allowed continue unabated. But to this must be added the fact that there are people who are hellbent on creating just such a social breakdown. Konrad Heiden, who was a German opponent of Hitler’s and who knew Hitler personally, described a certain déclassé element that supported Hitler as the ‘armed bohemians’. And indeed this term could almost be used to describe the element that is currently trying to foment trouble and collapse on all fronts. Except that technically they belong to the Left – to the extent that the terms Right and Left longer have any relevance. Best perhaps they could be described as nihilists or anarchists.

There is a certain type of international agitator that currently fits the bill – middle class, generally swanning around the world on an allowance from daddy, without job or career, except perhaps a few diplomas or an unfinished degree from the LSE or some other such fashionable institute. Really, they are not political at all – more what Lenin used describe as ‘useful idiots’. It seems to me that what they really are into is street theatre, posturing with petrol bombs and slings and ball-bearings, intent on creating an image for themselves that seems ‘cool’. Certainly one imagines there is very little intellect behind it. As well, one imagines that it is a phenomenon in the process of creation – rather in the way that stars and planets are said to condense out of globules of gaseous matter; certainly there is no finished aspect to it, and I would not be surprised if it, at the moment of self-consciousness, finds itself on the radical right rather than the left – or at least predominantly so.

For the fact is that the mainstream Left works much closer to the coal face, engaged in the ‘rights’ and ‘equality’ industry. This is one of the staples of Marxist agitation: to take the proclaimed tenets of capitalist society – say, liberty, fraternity, equality – and push them out to the point that they become weapons for the undermining of that society. Of course there can be no argument in the normal course of events against seeking to extend rights or gain greater equality. But the point is that the success or otherwise of such campaigns is of secondary importance to, certainly, revolutionary Marxists and anarchists: the primary value of such things lies in the extent to which they inch society closer to the edge of the abyss.

Take the ‘equality’ industry . . . One philosopher has written quite well on it – Mary Midgeley – without at the same time necessarily following the argument to its logical conclusion. The fact is that there can be no intermediate halt to demands for equality short of reducing society to a flat level desert of undifferentiated rubble. Whenever an ‘equality’ is argued for and gained in one field, another deserving cause immediately presents itself, and so on and on – all the time boring like woodworm, until at last society is undermined and collapses in on itself. It is a variant on the statement by Lenin – and a way of achieving the same end by different means – that equated revolution to a bomb in the basement of an apartment building, reducing it all to rubble, out of which the revolutionary party could then begin to build the mythical classless society.

The architect, by way of digression, of this new Marxist approach was primarily Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist who died in prison (of natural causes) in 1937 under Mussolini. Realizing before most that the revolution was not going to be achieved on the barricades, he sought instead a way of achieving it by stealth. From now on Marxists “must join in whatever liberating causes might come to the fore in different countries and cultures as popular movements, however dissimilar those movements might initially be from Marxism and from one another. Marxists must join with women, with the poor, with those who find certain civil laws oppressive. They must adopt different tactics for different cultures and subcultures. They must never show an inappropriate face. And, in this manner, they must enter into every civil, cultural and political activity in every nation, patiently leavening them all as thoroughly as yeast leavens bread . . . a quiet and anonymous revolution. No armed and bloody uprisings would do it. No bellicose confrontations would win the day. Rather, everything must be done in the name of man’s dignity and rights, and in the name of his autonomy and freedom from outside constraint. From the claims and constraints of Christianity, above all.”

The above quote is from Malachi Martin, a controversial priest and writer, and an opponent of Vatican II. But it does cover the main points. I saw the idea being advanced in the sixties . . .’

Scratch them and they seethe . . .

A few months ago I wrote a letter to a local paper, the Argus, about the industrial schools controversy. Now, for whatever reason, the argument was somewhat cut in editing, although the conclusions remained unchanged. My only disagreement with the process is an aesthetic one—that it left the letter looking rather like a bad haircut (something that I am in other circumstances more than familiar with).

The letter as it appeared—and indeed as it was written—was somewhat ambiguous. It was hard to say on which side of the controversy I was coming down. Indeed I had no overriding interest in the matter—what I was interested in was the process by which it had after so many years suddenly come to dominate the headlines.

We live in the age of a new mythology. On the one side the old, restrictive, cruel, right-wing world of things as they allegedly used to be; and on the other the new liberal world of compassion, compassion, compassion—an over-brimming compassion for everything seemingly weak and endangered and oppressed in the world.

Now I can give a snapshot judgement on the merits of the two positions, having in my working life (and as a trade union representative) had experience of both regimes—and, paradoxically, I would have to say that the people with the most ‘nature’ in them were those who nowadays would be branded as ‘conservative’ or ‘illiberal’.

It was with the declaredly ‘liberal’ managements and managers that one had the most trouble. Even in situations where the argument went beyond any matter of right or wrong and cut to grounds of pure compassion—with such people it was as though they had been innoculated against any possibility of making a humanitarian response in real life.

And the thing is that this peculiar dichotomy between practice and theory does not seem to have been an exception, but is rather part-and-parcel of the whole liberal identikit.

I append some quotes from The Art of Hating by Gerald Schoenewolf Ph.D (Jason Aronson Inc., 1991), a psychoanalytical appraisal of the liberal character. As will become obvious in reading, by ‘liberal’ is meant, in this context, basically those who espouse the modern progressivist agenda.

“Today’s liberals are cut off from their feelings and enmeshed in words and ideas. Out of touch with their core, they feel incomplete, and politicize their feelings, looking to an outside source to provide them with security. They demand that their views be applied to all of society, and they compensate for emotional detachment through declarations of brotherhood with people they have never met, trying to solve their personal conflicts by curing the ills of the world. They tend to be educated, rather than working-class people. They are drawn to passive rather than active pursuits . . .

“. . . Liberals use their facility with words, as well as a self-righteous and sarcastic tone of voice, to defeat and destroy opponents. They fling around words like ‘bigot,’ ‘sexist,’ ‘racist,’ and ‘homophobic’ in order to shame and silence detractors, and they address them in a tone of voice that suggests that the opponent is evil for even thinking, much less saying things that go against the liberal ideology. The more psychologically disturbed liberals are, the more they cling to the notion that liberalism represents all that is progressive and good and right, and can never be questioned . . .

“. . . Malcolm Muggeridge . . . a British literary critic, in an allusion to the liberal’s narcissistic insistence on ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ and denial of aggression, wrote that ‘Liberalism will be seen historically as the great destructive force of our time, much more than communism, fascism, Nazism or any of the other lunatic creeds which make such immediate havoc.’ In a sense Muggeridge may be right, insofar as societies generally start out conservative but become increasingly liberal as they decline.”

At the Ceide Fields . . .

On the north Mayo coast I met the knowledge
that there are lives that must be hard held
against despair
as a fractious horse;
lives without hope,
or even the prospect of hope,
corkscrewed into a barren landscape like stumps of bog oak;
with none of the consoling, hidden vistas
of a gentler country,
where people can fool themselves
as to what lies around
the next bend.

And I realised that, in this situation, man both reaches God
and pushes him out
to the utmost valenced limit
of his understanding.

We have become too crowded by God,
been made too familiar,
like the press of burnoosed Arabs in a souk,
so that he has become a Novocain that doesn’t work,
a watered penicillin,
the bleat of priests repeating formulae at a funeral.
We can no longer see the forest for the trees,
due to too close a magnification on the gewgaws,
the statues,
the rosary beads . . .

Out here, in the hard life,
if you want to see God, it’s not in the chapel,
it’s away there on the horizon where the sky meets sea.
For this is the only God that could make sense in the situation,
implacable, harsh, refusing to bend the knee
to the prayers of men,
dropping them in it to see how well they swim,
and, whatever about the soul, judging the body accordingly,
granting survival to the sole extent
that they have tried themselves to the exhausted limit
and can do no more.

That is not to say that you cannot find God in the chapel,
the softer side of him,
the downy, sparse-bearded visage of the Son.
But the God of fear, the God of anger, the God
who is the beginning of wisdom,
he is below here at this moment,
white-headed as a Friesian bull,
rooting at the pilings of the cliff-face. (2004)

* * *

[I reprint also a section of a document written contemporaneously with the above poem and to an extent explanatory of it:]

‘ . . . Famine apart, any effort to eke out life on this Mayo coast must have at the best of times been a precarious thing. What was the religious or philosophical outlook likely to have been of a people forced to live over generations in such conditions of elemental hardship?

Life has a tendency sometimes of testing a people almost down to destruction, until all there is left is a nub of those who will not permit themselves be easily destroyed. And more often than not the sole thing found unmelted in the ashes of that process is the keen, clean hardness of a people’s faith in God and resignation to his will. Not the volitionless resignation of fatalism, but instead a recognition of the presumption of any attempt to second-guess God in the matter, and the need to always deliver of one’s best efforts in the struggle for survival.

In such a world, in which no kindness or mitigation is to be expected, it would seem natural that God would in a certain sense be pushed back a remove - not out of disrespect or unbelief, but rather as an electron might be displaced outwards in the shells of an atom. This is not a place where conventional piety is liable to prosper; the only prayers possible of answer here are those of sweat and hard work, with no guarantee at all of success as the final outcome. In such a situation people tend to cut their idea of God to suit their circumstance. The God of the remote places tends to be Himself remote, harsh, inflexibly just. He is a God in His way as forbidding as the bare horizons and grey seas. He is a God Whose ways are mysterious and into Whose hands is resigned the fate of all human endeavours. He is a God liable to be seen as helping those who help themselves, and, if intervening at all, only doing so in circumstances where the individual has exhausted all possible effort.

As to the practical matter of a philosophy conducive to survival in the Mayo of the 1840’s, where, according to one contemporary commentator, the great famine took on “its most appalling form”, there are recorded “instances in which Cottiers had buried potatoes, with the View of preserving them for Seed - and . . . had actually allowed members of their Families to perish of want and had suffered the sorest extremities of hunger themselves, sooner than betray their cherished hoard.” (quoted in Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, OUP, 1985). Once you get over the immediate visceral reaction to this report, you may begin to see here a universal lesson in the logic of survival in hard times.

If the cottiers mentioned seem cruel, they were cruel from the most understandable of motives: the need to try and secure the survival of at least a portion of their families, even at the expense of their own lives and health, and the lives and health of other members of their families. Yet saving the potatoes for seed offered no guarantee of success: if the next season’s harvest failed – and the potato crop had failed in successive years in 1845 and 1846 - then all the effort and suffering would have been in vain. It is a problem worthy of the philosophical subtlety of Pascal. Yet the answer is simple: only those prepared to make the terrible sacrifice of keeping back part of the potato crop for seed had any realistic hope of survival. In taking the steps that they did, the cottiers were not guaranteeing the remaining members of their families survival, but rather the possibility - the chance - of survival, all other things being equal.

Nor was it simply a matter of consuming or not consuming the potatoes: also involved was the physical effort by a starving people to get the saved seed into the ground, and tend it, and watch over it on tenterhooks, anxious all the time that it would not betray their hopes.

Should the following season’s harvest fail, then those who ate the seed potatoes were no worse off than those who saved them: both were likely to perish. However if the harvest was healthy, those who gave into hunger and ate the seed were, at best, likely to be reduced to begging of the charity of their more strong-minded neighbours. At worst they were reduced to a death of slow starvation. In either event, they had lost the possibility of control of their own destinies: unwilling or unable to take the hard decisions necessary to help themselves survive, they were reduced to a futile reliance on God or fate or luck.

The principle involved here has applications in all fields. For example, you have the student who hasn’t studied for his exams and hopes to get through on pure luck. He may well succeed; there are known instances of it. On the other hand, you have the student who has prepared diligently. He should succeed, but it is also quite possible that he will fail. There are many instances of this as well. Yet the overriding fact is that the odds are stacked heavily in favour of the student who has through his own efforts tried to achieve the customary preconditions for success. The feckless may well on occasions succeed and the diligent fail – but the fact that such instances are generally found to be worthy of comment is evidence of how clearly contrary to the normal state of things they tend to run . . .’

Trust Me, I'm a TD . . .

It is interesting the way that politicians are currently trying to back into the thicket of the public service by way of camouflage. ‘We’re all public servants now!’ seems to be the cry.

Several months ago there was a government TD on the radio—I can’t remember exactly who—an ex-minister perhaps, I think—speaking in self-righteous indignation at the suggestion that politicians hadn’t made a sufficient financial sacrifice. ‘We took the same cut as the rest of the public service’ was the substance of his response.

Now when I hear the term ‘public service’ what springs immediately to mind are people such as those working in hospitals or the civil service or mending our roads—people in the main working for ordinary salaries in ordinary jobs with fairly limited career paths.

The fact is that, whatever the technical definition may be, politicians are not public servants. They are in fact the public leadership, the leadership of the state, and they benefit accordingly. They are individuals who have put themselves forward to be the eyes and ears and warning voice for the rest of us as we move forward into an uncertain future.

Except that in the current case they have, almost without exception, proved to be collectively blind, deaf and dumb—more candidates for handicapped parking stickers than elected office.

Now by some miracle they seem to have been restored to full capacity and are going to lead us sure-footedly through the worsening economic blizzard.

The terrible thing is that there is no rational alternative.

Horseman, Pass By . . .

I can write of the liberal agenda, of the ‘new morality,’ because I’ve been in the belly of the beast. Actually, that’s not true—I was never really part of it—more a fellow-traveller.

And I am not claiming any merit in this; rather the reverse. Russell had the excuse of his infatuation with reason; his wife, Dora, conveniently found in the ‘new morality’ a higher calling. I had neither of those excuses. If I embraced, or appeared to embrace, the liberal agenda, it was simply because it suited me at the time to do so. I never had any ideological or emotional commitment to it, but rather a pragmatic one. It was a tool too good to pass up in pursuit of more personal and immediate satisfactions.

But nonetheless I was there—I pitched my tent in the same field as the sexual revolution and was a close observer of it and some of its main players during its seminal period—from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, and thereafter, intermittently, for a few further years.

So I know of what I write . . .

Rendering an Account . . .

Following on from an earlier posting on Bertrand Russell (see October 2nd: The Heart is the Matter . . .)

While Russell tried to bend his will and flesh to a progressivist ethic that proved ultimately to be uncongenial to him, his wife, Dora, had no such problem. The progressivist ethic rather than being a hardship to her encompassed all her deepest yearnings. The ‘new morality’ was Dora written in programmatic form.

Dora believed what she believed because she wanted to believe it. At one level, the ‘new morality’ was a rationalization, and hence a justification, of her emotional and instinctive drives and her need, in the face of conventional morality, to assuage them.

Nor did this involve, as it so often does, an hypocrisy. It didn’t represent a private vice, but rather a public call to action. Dora wore her heart (or whatever) firmly on her sleeve and refused to compromise, even when life turned bitterly against her. She comes out of Monk’s book in many ways as a much more sympathetic and human figure than does Russell.

By contrast, Russell believed in the ‘new morality’ because he ‘reasoned’ himself into it, admittedly under influence of Dora. Both, in their different ways, were wrong. Russell put too much faith in mechanical abstract reason; Dora, rather than finding truth, instead invented a ‘truth’ of her own, one that jelled with her own desires and instincts, and persuaded herself that it was in some sense universal.

Yet in substance the ‘new morality’ wasn’t really that new at all. The aristocracy had, for example, been practicing a form of open marriage for years. According to the formula, it was the duty of the well-bred wife to provide an ‘heir and a spare,’ beyond which she could live much as she liked. As A.P.W. Malcomson noted in The Pursuit of an Heiress: Aristocratic Marriage in Ireland 1740 – 1840, ‘adultery on the part of the wife was a routine fact of upper-class life and was practised on an extensive scale . . .’

But in this form it was a private vice—something that was tolerated and that official society averted its eyes from, unless compelled otherwise by some foolishness or inappropriateness of behaviour on the woman’s part. In which case, all the familiar social devices of disapproval and ostracism were likely to come into play.

Such upper-class adultery was also a private vice in another way, insofar as it represented something of a ‘closed shop.’ Outside of aristocratic circles, it was something generally not spoken of, and certainly not something to be preached or recommended to the ‘lower’ orders.

By contrast, the Bloomsbury group of the early twentieth century, which was upper-middle-class rather than aristocratic, tried to, among other things, ape in extended form the aristocratic practice minus the hypocrisy. There seems to have existed the intention of a rather painful honesty among its members with regard to their liaisons. Monk catches the fervid atmosphere of it all, when he speaks of Gerald Brennan as ‘one of the links in a subsequently much-discussed chain of Bloomsbury romantic entanglements: he was in love with Dora Carrington, who, while married to Ralph Partridge, was in love with Lytton Strachey; Strachey, meanwhile, was besotted with Partridge, who, in turn, was in love with Frances Marshall, whom . . . etc. etc.’

The thing is that the Bloomsbury clique was firmly elitist—one of its members, Desmond McCarthy, attributed its eventual demise to ‘a considerable infiltration of inferior persons’— and while not inclined to hide its light under a bushel, nonetheless seems to have had no great orientation towards propagandizing its values and practices.

The ‘new morality’ wasn’t new in another sense too. At most, the Russells merely delivered a new formulation, a new rationalization, for an existing strain of social belief and practice rooted in Marxism and radical feminism (something to be dealt with in a future posting). What was important about their role was mainly Russell’s status as a major intellectual figure and the added influence that this could bring to any beliefs he seemed to espouse.

The ancient Aryan society of northern India was organized in the form of four castes. The most important caste, as was recognized by all of the others, was the peasantry—the shudra or ‘foot’ of society, the foundation upon which society was built. Without the agricultural surpluses produced by the farming caste there could be no priestly caste or warrior caste or merchant caste. The whole existence of society was bound up with the health of its ‘lowest’ and broadest layer.

In like manner, for modern society, the working and farming classes and the small business class ultimately provide the basis for all the rest. The health of the overall society—whether it is to be a house built on sand or one built on solid ground—depends in the last resort upon the health of its productive sectors.

The aristocratic and upper-middle-class practices that we discussed above were in the main private practices—they had little or no active orientation to those outside their immediate social circle or class. People privately pursued pleasure within the norms laid down within their particular classes or cliques—which they were entitled to do.

The Russells, both committed to socialism, by comparison were active proselytizers. They believed that the world could be improved through a ‘struggle against conventional morality and the established order.’ They both, especially Dora, believed in what they were doing and propagandised for it relentlessly—Russell in his writings and lectures; Dora in her activities, especially among working-class women. So fervently did they believe in their program that they set up a pioneering school, where children were to be educated ‘in the light of the “new philosophy”, rather than under the yoke of the old superstitions of religion, patriotism and conventional morality.’

The question ultimately is not about the bona fides of the Russells or their right to promote the things that they believed in—which right of course they had. Rather it is about the efficacy of their programme. Viewed over a reasonable historical distance: Did it succeed in delivering what it sought to deliver—certainly in educational terms, future generations that were to be ‘fearless, independent and free’? Or did it deliver something else entirely?

The subsequent history of the Russell children, who were guinea pigs to the educational and child-rearing theories of their parents, raises a major question mark over the whole programme. Both children and grandchildren were to pursue lives inexorably marked by suicide and madness—although the latter may have been exacerbated by a strain of congenital insanity believed to run through the Russell line. In retrospect, the immediate children consistently blamed their experimental upbringing and the effects on their childhood lives of the ‘new morality’ for their later problems.

Over the intervening ninety or so years the philosophy that the Russells (among others of their contemporaries) espoused has become paradigmatic. It underlies the world we live in now. It pours through innumerable channels into the eyes and ears and minds of every member of every class. Unless you were to shut yourself up in a nunnery—and even then . . .

But at least we are in a position now to assess it objectively—to measure it against reality and see to what extent it has succeeded or failed in its programmatic promise to deliver a new paradise—entailing a free, fulfilled and happy life for all. And, if it has failed, to examine to what extent the whole project was a delusional, self-serving fantasy to begin with, or the product of an untethered reason, or both.

By Way of a Filler . . .

A section from part of a discussion document written by me on 10th October 2008, that has, I like to think, a relevance broader than the immediate and obvious circumstances in which it was composed:

‘ . . . By now it has become a truism that the first thing a country long at peace must do when it goes to war is sack the general staff, who, through the times of quiet, tend to have been promoted, not on the basis of their military virtues, but because they play a wicked game of bridge or know someone who counts or else are eminently clubbable. This, of course, is by way of a joke, and is no doubt offensive to the normal run of general staffs. But it is nonetheless indicative, I suggest, of a deeper truth.

People are generally quiescent—when times are good and times are quiet they are prepared to let things sail on without giving them too much thought. But in a crisis, when their interests or safety or livelihoods are threatened, they demand leaders who are capable of cutting straight through to the root of the problem and solving it—rather in the manner of Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot. But, at the same time, they are never comfortable with such leaders, even the ones that are successful. People desire strong and charismatic leadership—but only in situations that demand it. There is nothing as wearing to the popular consciousness as an adventurous and ambitious leader who continues in power beyond the period of the necessity of his being in power, no matter how capable. The people of France were long sick of Napoleon before his final demise; likewise with Hitler. The fate of Churchill after the Second World War is too familiar to need repeating.

In actual fact, people as a rule prefer mediocrity—and ‘mediocre’ doesn’t refer to the worst; it is a sort of halfway house—neither good nor bad, just average. If the mediocre are capable of rule, then the times must be stable. It is a bit like the canary in the coalmine: if the canary is standing upright on his perch and preening himself, then everything is ok. If he starts swaying on his feet, then watch out! Mediocre leaderships are a natural concomitant of peaceful and prosperous times—people don’t want anyone who is likely to endanger the stability, and, in turn, the stability means that no great ability or initiative is demanded of politicians etc.

A less pejorative term than ‘mediocre’ might be ‘technician.’ One could imagine a factory where successive generations of technicians walk around in overalls with an oiling can, greasing the workings of a machine built long before their time. They themselves possess no great creative mechanical facility—but then they don’t need to. As long as the machine keeps working everything’s fine. And then one day the machine, as it were, starts spitting blood . . .

Most of us in the developed world have lived our lives under the rule of exactly such technical elites, competent in their own way, and able to cope so long as the general backdrop remains relatively unchanged. But the problem is that the backdrop is changing—and changing in such a way as to seem to threaten us with consequences beyond even our worst imaginings. I may be wrong on this—certainly, I hope I’m wrong—but it seems to me that the world is lurching into some fin-de-siecle crisis that is beyond our control and which must work itself out in its own way, whatever that way may be . . .'

Slightly More Russell . . .

Another quotation from Bertrand Russell—one that sums up what it is that I was trying to say in the last posting and in some of the previous postings on the dangers of relying purely on theory and abstract thought. The italics at the end of it are mine:

‘In my second marriage, I had tried to preserve that respect for my wife’s liberty which I thought that my creed enjoined. I found, however, that my capacity for forgiveness and what may be called Christian love was not equal to the demands that I was making on it, and that persistence in a hopeless endeavour would do much harm to me, while not achieving the intended good to others. Anybody else could have told me this in advance, but I was blinded by theory.’

The Heart is the Matter . . .

The passage I recently quoted in relation to Bertrand Russell [27th September: Synchronicity or What . . .?] describes a perceived gap between Russell as philosopher and Russell as man.

Russell as philosopher is described as ‘the man of pure intellect who is cut off from all feelings.’ And this is the conventional view of philosophers in general: people who have risen above the common herd and who exist in a rarified atmosphere of pure logical thought, following, as philosophy lecturers like to say, ‘the argument wherever it might lead.’

In other words, they are perceived as people whose head rules their heart—having decided on the rational course of action in any situation, they bend the human side of their nature to act in accordance with their will, and not the other way round.

Russell makes an interesting case history as to the extent such a thing is in actual fact possible.

Famously, he was engaged in an ‘open marriage’ with his second wife, Dora. The terms of this were that each could continue to see others outside the marriage and, somewhat implicitly, if any children were born as a result of such liaisons on Dora’s part, they would be recognized by Russell as his own.

Dora seems to have been the leading proponent of this arrangement. Russell, it must be said, as sometimes strangely happens with ‘great’ men, was arguably something of a suggestible old sod. But the fact that he had a stated philosophy that after five years any woman becomes boring and due for trading in may have encouraged him to think that he and Dora were working along common lines.

In fact, they weren’t.

Nonetheless, Russell, aided by Dora, sought to knit a rationalist theory to justify their state of affairs. ‘The New Morality,’ as it was called, represented a call to arms for ‘progressive’ people, that involved undermining ‘traditional attitudes to religion and morality,’ and spoke for a new society based on reason in which people would be free to satisfy their every need without, in Dora’s words, ‘those confounded silly jealousies.’

[I should point out here that I have no particular interest in and no opinions to offer on Russell’s and Dora’s domestic arrangements. The thing that I am after is the extent to which the Olympian ideal of a world ordered purely on reason—unbuffetted by the frustrations of life and our inherited animal natures—is possible. On the evidence of Russell’s case, it is not.]

Russell was never comfortable with the arrangement he had entered into, although, gamely enough, he continued to write and preach in support of it, and practise it. The breaking point seems to have come when Dora became pregnant by someone else, someone whom Russell [now Earl Russell] deeply despised. Even then he tried to bend himself to the ethic he had forged and gave his name to the daughter who resulted. But at that stage, it seems, the marriage was definitely ended. Nor were matters helped by Dora getting pregnant for a second time by the same man.

The extent of Russell’s descent from the Olympian ideal—and from the progressivist ethic advanced by him in the 1920s—is indicated by a remark attributed to him in his old age, concerning the ‘daughter’ he had originally legitimized: ‘I have no second daughter. That was my wife’s child. It took me ten years to get the bastard out of Burke[‘s Peerage].’

Is it possible for human beings to rise above the tides of life to a serene world where pure and selfless thought becomes the sole motivator of our actions? The case of Russell, doyen of liberal opinion for much of the twentieth century, suggests no.

What about the saints? Perhaps. But if I remember my reading of the Confessions correctly, their perfection was due mainly to the grace of God. Man on his own behalf, according to Augustine, was capable of achieving very little. And in the case of the saints, often what seems to have been involved is a process of transformation, a change of nature or character, and not simply a rigid enforcement of the will—an escape into an atmosphere (and I am snatching purely at memory here) of ‘freedom, perfect freedom.’

I remember several years ago hearing someone talk about their time working in a nursing home in the North. He was describing a retired Presbyterian minister who was suffering from dementia. ‘You should hear the language of him,’ he said. ‘And the nurses can’t go in on their own or his hands are all over them.’

And as is the way of these things, I found myself in an instant forming a picture of the man. I saw him as someone who had bent his life to doing the right thing, as he saw it, and avoiding the wrong—thus ‘proving’ to me that it was possible to live a life of hard subjection to the will. But there had been no process of transmutation involved—or to use the Freudian term, sublimation. Rather it had been akin to stuffing a suitcase full of one’s dirty laundry only to have it burst open on the station platform. The moment his mental functioning began to falter all the old repressed desires and instincts came tumbling out of their storage space unchanged.

Now, as I say, this image is purely a work of the imagination. Yet I have a strong feeling that it presents an accurate picture of the reality. From time to time, when I still think of him, I genuflect in recognition of the strength of will and the self-discipline involved in shaping oneself over such a long time to such an uncongenial task—at the same time I recognize what seems to me the utter futility of it.

[The raw facts in this posting come from the two-volume biography of Russell by Ray Monk and published in paperback by Vintage in 2001. In some subsequent posting—and if there is anybody out there to read it—I would like to look at the matter from the viewpoint of Dora Russell, for in its own way I think it has much to say for the whole process of abstract philosophical reasoning and the assumptions that underlie it.]

Public Sector Cutbacks

The thing about being seen as a soft touch is that you are likely to be touched again and again until you make it plain that you’re anything but. The public service has no choice but to react to the threat of pay-cuts—after having already been hit by a previous pay-cut in the shape of the pension levy. Whatever action is taken has to sting sufficiently to make the government think twice about targeting them again. Otherwise there is no point in taking action.

The trade unions are in a somewhat different situation. They are concerned about wages and pensions—especially their own wages and pensions. This is quite understandable in the circumstances. The great fear of the unions at the moment is that a failure to adequately respond to the threat of new pay cuts will lead to a haemorrhaging of membership. The trick the unions have to pull off is to convince their public service membership that they are going all out against any further impositions, while at the same time skirting the possibility of any Armageddon-style confrontation as might reveal a lack of clout.

A hard line to draw—never mind to walk!

The Waning of Competence . . .

Rumer Godden is a novelist probably best known nowadays for the book on which the Powell/Pressburger film Black Narcissus was based (a film which, by the way, she absolutely hated). Her importance and enduring appeal as a writer – she died in 1998, aged 90 - is shown by the fact that her books are still largely in print.

China Court is among the lesser books that she wrote, but that does not stop it containing the most powerful picture that I know of in fiction of what it was like to be a woman of ability in a (and I hate using this word) ‘patriarchal’ society, thwarted in every department of her life, yet, like a flower buried under a heap of stones, struggling through in the end to a certain crippled self-expression.

It is not exactly airport reading – in a sense, it is a slightly difficult book. A bit – a little bit – stream of consciousness, with a cast of characters, each taking turns in the foreground, so that sometimes for a few moments it can be somewhat confusing as to where one enters and another exits.

The secret of the book, I think (and I am working here from memory, for it is a long time since I read it), is that for much of its length it consists of the reveries of an old woman who is dying.

Now it is not a feminist tract, in the sense that it is, in the context we are discussing, about an individual woman and not all women writ large. Just as with men - for every woman of ability there is a more than balancing gaggle of those of little or no ability. In positions that demand a certain competence in life, better the woman of ability than the man of no ability. And vice versa, too.

The idea has been advanced over the years that it is the hostility of men that has held back the advancement of women, and while there may be a certain truth in this, there is also a more unisex antipathy that affects both men and women, especially those of any perceived ability. Jonathan Swift perhaps put it best: ‘When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him [or her] by this sign, that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.’

The reason why I bring this up is the appearance under the influence of modern feminism of what I can only describe as the ‘token woman.’ You know the situation: you have to consult someone professionally on an important matter, and nowadays, six or seven times out of ten, that person proves to be a woman – and often – I repeat, often, not always – the emotion you leave the meeting with is that in some way you have been stiffed.

It is easy to understand how such a situation might arise: under pressure for gender equality employers, for whatever reason – maybe ideological commitment or fear of equality legislation or just the desire not to appear out of step – increase their recruitment of women. But often, one suspects, the emphasis may be on ‘women,’ rather than on the competence of such women. And in case anyone thinks I’m being unfair here, I am speaking from hard experience.

But, of course, I am being unfair. Go consult a solicitor or dentist or accountant or whatever these days and as often as not, irrespective of sex, you come away with the feeling of having been dealing with somebody not in complete command of their brief. I put it down to the rise of practices – as opposed to the old days of individual practitioners. Years ago you went, say, to the dentist – nowadays you go to a dental practice; and unless you have some special line to the head honcho you are likely to find yourself submitted to the doubtful competence of the latest trainee or recruit.

There was a time, I believe, when people in need of free and urgent treatment might submit themselves to the dental schools (and I am not singling out dentists here, for what I am discussing seems a more general phenomenon) to play a part in the training of students. Nothing it seems has changed. Only you don’t have to leave your own locality now – and you have to pay for it too!

There was also a time when, as the Americans say, hanging a shingle outside one’s door meant something. It was an indication of competence. All that, I would suggest, has changed. Nowadays, as with builders and plumbers and mechanics, the merits of professionals are more a matter of word of mouth transmission than any automatic belief in the charters and degree parchments with which they adorn their walls.

There are of course reasons for this - and I am sure it is not a new phenomenon; it just seems now to be altogether more prevalent. To go into the causes, as I see them, would be to overburden this mailing - far too long as it is already. At some later date, and should my interest in blogging persist, I hope to return to it . . .

Synchronicity or What . . . ?

I know it may appear contrived, but I assure you it is purely fortuitous. A few hours after making my last posting concerning the dangers of abstract reasoning unbalanced by common sense or intuition, I came across the following quotation. It is by Gerald Brenan, a once-famous author on things Spanish, and relates to Bertrand Russell:

' . . . his mind and work can be seen as split into two separate compartments. In one he is the logician and philosopher, the man of pure intellect who is completely cut off from all feelings. In the other he is the political writer, educationalist, teacher, prophet, moved by generous indignation at the follies and cruelties of the world, but also by a hankering for public esteem and applause . . . But when engaged in this way he was severely handicapped. Pure reason is not a good instrument for plotting a course in politics . . . though he was not lacking in the faculty of intuition he rarely gave it full play but drove his logical judgement through the maze of inter-related circumstances, simplifying everything that lay in its path till its conclusions no longer corresponded to reality . . .'

The quotation is from the second volume (Bertrand Russell, The Ghost of Madness 1921-1970) of the biography by Ray Monk, which is to be highly recommended.

Reasons to be Doleful . . . 1,2,3

Nobody saw it coming – indeed, no one could have seen it coming.

At least that’s what they tell us – the politicians and financial establishments and (with several honourable exceptions) the economists and journalists etc. etc.

John McFall, Chairman of the British Government Treasury Select Committee (and who arguably should be among the last to speak) says now that ‘even monkeys could have seen it coming’ – the ‘it’ being the financial catastrophe that has in recent times engulfed the world.

And how are we to explain the blindness of our own monkeys? Three possible explanations present themselves.

The first one (which, I suspect, applies mainly to politicians) is that they were too dumb to see what was happening in front of their noses.

The second is that they – or at least some of them (especially in the financial establishment) – didn’t want to see it. John Kenneth Galbraith has shown how the American Federal Reserve Board was aware of serious imbalances in the economy some two years ahead of the Great Wall Street Crash. Effectively the members of the Board did nothing about it - because they were afraid of being labeled as the men who brought the boom to an end . . . with all that might have meant for their future careers.

The third and most interesting explanation for our current situation is that some people who should have known better were simply blinded by figures and spin and academic bullshit and simply couldn’t see it coming.

Nobody has been more scathing of the deficiencies of academic economic theory than Nassim Nicholas Taleb – see his 2007 Financial Times op-ed piece ‘The Pseudo-Science Hurting Markets’ (www.fooledbyrandomness.com/FT-Nobel.pdf). His argument is that the business schools have consistently ignored common sense and hands-on experience in favour of purely academic theory - with disastrous results.

But one doesn’t have to listen just to Taleb. The story of Joe Kennedy and the shoeshine boy is too well known to bear repeating. But the crux of it is that Kennedy not alone escaped the Wall Street Crash but made a fortune out of it, not by reading spreadsheets or financial forecasts or brokers’ reports, but through the use of those two indispensable twins: common sense and gut-instinct.

The fact is that (and not just in terms of financial matters) the world has fallen increasingly under the sway of mechanistic reasoning. Scientists are trying to design computers that will replicate humans, when the real problem is that people are more and more coming to resemble machines. The world is being increasingly run by people who have come out of universities with their pragmatic and common-sense faculties clipped in favour of a disembodied system of abstract reasoning that works well on paper, but more often than not proves a disaster in the face of reality.

But that is all by-and-by . . . The purpose of this posting is to discuss why so many people of clear ability and intelligence seemed to go snow-blind in the face of the crisis that was rushing up on us - at a time when so many people in the street could sense that there was something wrong, especially in terms of the property bubble.

Whether we are anyway nearer an answer is something I really don’t know . . .